The Amoeba Boys: Philippine DDoS Attacks on China

Well this is embarrassing: Having played up the Philippines' emergence as a technology hub in Southeast Asia to rival India, the sheer lameness of its sympathizers' Internet attacks on China is appalling. If you are going to cause mayhem online, then you have to at least target frequently-visited websites. I have long been fascinated with D-I-Y reprisals among netizens through distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on websites, especially those hosted by the offending government. In 2007 I wrote about Russians mounting DDoS attacks against Estonia after the latter relocated a statue commemorating the USSR liberating Tallinn in 1944. Just a few weeks back, I also wrote about how torrent site Rutracker.org fell to Ukrainian DDoS attacks.

The theater of operations here though is the Asia-Pacific region. At the ongoing World Economic Forum in Manila, Vietnamese President Nguyen Tan Dung just met his Filipino counterpart Bnigno Aquino III and both condemned Chinese aggression. You should be aware of what's happening with Vietnam right now, but the Chinese are also agitating the Philippines. PRC flunkies have been busy constructing structures on one of the Spratly Islands it contests with the Philippines, the Johnson South Reef AKA the Philippines' "Mabini Reef" and China's "Yongshu Reef." In either case--parking an oil rig in contested waters (Vietnam) or building on a contested reef (Philippines), the Chinese are violating the 2002 declaration agreed to with ASEAN members it has territorial squabbles with not to escalate matters.

So, what are Filipinos to do other than mount a DDOS attack as sympathetic netizens are supposed to do nowadays? OK, but if you're going to "hurt" China, you might as well take down major sites. How about gov.cn portals, the China Daily or Xinhua for starters? The PRC Ministry of Foreign Affairs seems obvious. That will certainly get their attention. To really cripple Chinese commerce, how about hitting business-to-business powerhouses like Alibaba and Baidu? Unfortunately, the list of targeted sites seem to have been chosen to make a mockery of the attackers in being of next to no consequence to Chinese users whatsoever. They even list links to GIFs, fer cryin' out loud. Suffice to say that no Chinese are really being inconvenienced by these pathetic DDoS attacks. As I recall, Taiwan hit Philippine government websites much harder when one of their fishermen was accidentally killed since gov.ph sites were down for the longest time.

These hackers are so lame that I have to lump them with some of the Powerpuff Girls' least threatening "criminal" opponents--if you can call them that--the Amoeba Boys. For those who used to watch those fine cartoons, the "crimes" they committed included snipping off warning tags from mattresses, jaywalking, and other heinous stuff:

With their gangster affectations, these aspiring criminals would love
nothing more than to be regarded as serious villains worthy of fighting,
and even getting beaten up and sent to jail by the Powerpuff Girls.
Unfortunately, their brains are far too primitive to devise a crime
above the level of littering or jaywalking.

Attention Philippine "hacktivists": you are the Amoeba Boys of DDoS attacks. The Chinese do not fear you, they are laughing at you. Unless you can actually bring down sites of consequence and cause real disturbances to mainland residents, you are the cyber-equivalent of the Amoeba Boys. It isn't exactly rocket science to find out where to hit them where it hurts if you were really serious about not being laughingstocks.